Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet

“Get you out of range of my monster eyes,” she sang atonally at the chorus’s reprise. “Best thing I ever did for you, was get you out of range of my monster eyes—”

Then she fumbled her way into the verse’s start: “Before my eyes destroy you, better run, better run—” She hummed to dummy another line: “Nuh nuh huh feel my eyes abhor you, dunna nuh, dunna nuh—”

Matthew, not looking at Lucinda, grabbed the lyric at the next pass. He pigeoned his toes and shouted it at the draped windows as if to press it out into the night, then dropped register, incanting the lyric as a warning instead, his hair falling forward, gorgeously, into his eyes. Bedwin nodded. He quit playing lead fills in favor of the raw chord changes, chiming the riff on the downbeat. Denise thwacked her cymbal incontinently, railing above the sound the band was making. The words were freighted with a righteousness and panic each player felt as a confession. A voicing they couldn’t have sanctioned alone, only collectively. They chanted it in murmurs together the next time through, the now-already-inevitable chorus, inseparable from Bedwin’s chords:

Get you

out of range

of my

monster

eyes—

Their hearts huddled around the fledgling song as if it were a tendril of bonfire in wild darkness, something they nurtured which fed them in return.

lucinda, in shorts and sleeveless top, stretched in her chair in front of Millie’s Café, shading her eyes with one bare arm. Coffee steamed untouched on the table, too hot for the day. Noon light had drawn her to the sidewalk table like a snake lured to bathing on rock. Sporadic pedestrians blobbed past on their shadow forms. Los Angeles was a desert. The cars on Sunset Boulevard felt miles away across the margin of curb, tumble-weeds scouring paths to nowhere.

Deep in the luxury of Lucinda’s trance an alarm sounded. She lifted her arm from her eyes. A small man in black horn-rimmed glasses and a backward baseball cap had silently leaned to fit his face into her armpit, his nose nearly brushing her sprig of hair, his lips and eyelids narrowed in an expression of savor. The man, perhaps fifty, wore a wrinkled suit jacket over a gray T-shirt, with jeans and sneakers. He hopped back as she shifted, as though she’d startled him. She supposed she had. He had an abrupt flustered quality, like a woken duck.

“How do you do,” he said, righting himself. “The way you were sitting was extraordinarily lovely. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

“Well, you did.”

“Then I regret it. Jules Harvey.” He offered his hand, which she took unthinkingly.

“Luc—” she began, then stopped, dropping his hand.

“Luce? I wonder if you could tell me where to find Maltman Avenue.”

Lucinda’s tattooed waitress edged to her table, slipping the check beneath a saucer.

“Maltman’s the next block.” Lucinda pointed. “Look, you shouldn’t do that.” She slurped her tepid coffee, worthless now. It should have been iced.

“You mean—”

“Sneak up on people,” she said. She didn’t want to hear what he’d call it.

“I know, I know.” He pursed his lips, weighing the indulgence. At last he sighed, seeming to find it in himself to forgive. He fished in his jacket’s interior pocket for a folding map. “Have you heard of the Falmouth Strand Gallery?”

she walked Jules Harvey to the gallery’s entrance, a precinct of chaos. The Annoyance ’s photographer, a hulking blond in a leather jacket, slugged shoulder-loads of equipment from his double-parked van in through the doorway. Just inside, Falmouth presided, gesticulating furiously. Explaining some point to the Annoyance ’s writer, whose nodding dreadlocks shrouded the steno pad on which he jotted Falmouth’s words.

“Jules,” said Falmouth, interrupting himself when they walked through the door. “I’m thrilled to see you. We’re a bit of a mess. You met Lucinda, I see.” He bugged his eyes at Lucinda, a glare of panic reserved solely for her sake.

Jules Harvey nodded, his expression serene. Perhaps to him the episode on the sidewalk was a reasonable prelude to introduction. He dithered his hands, peering into the gallery’s dimmed recesses. “I’ll just have a look…there’s no hurry…”

“Lucinda can show you the complaint office.”

Jules Harvey trailed Lucinda into the small maze of carrels. One of Falmouth’s interns, seated in her cubicle, waved her pen in greeting, then frowned back to her call. On the canary pad before her she’d scrawled: nobody ever told me about aging/moisturizer/death . Lights on Lucinda’s phone blinked, another three complainers waiting. Now they called in the morning, too. Falmouth’s genius or folly, whichever it was, had slowly expanded to swallow Los Angeles.

“Wait in there,” Lucinda told Jules Harvey, nodding at another empty cubicle. “You can listen, just don’t pick up the phone.”

“Sure.” Harvey adjusted his black glasses frames and took the seat, meek as a clam. Lucinda had to remind herself he’d invaded her periphery, robbed her private smells.

“Complaints,” she said into the phone.

“Say something so I know it’s you,” said the voice she recognized.

Lucinda had to catch her breath. “We’d be happy to register any dissatisfaction you’ve experienced, sir.”

“I had to hang up on that other girl three times,” the caller said.

“There’s no need for that now, sir.”

“Yes, I can hear it’s you.”

“Yes.”

None of the other complainers interested Lucinda at all. They’d roused her curiosity for the first days, a week at most. After ten days she felt herself turning into a recording instrument. The complainers spoke of their husbands and wives and lovers and children, from cubicles of their own they whispered their despair at being employed, they called to disparage the quality of restaurants and hotels and limousines, they whined of difficulties moving their bowels or persuading anyone to read their screenplays or poetry. They fished for her sympathy. Using Falmouth’s scripted lines she dealt with them crisply, addressing them as ma’am and sir, cutting them off before they’d become familiar. The only one that mattered was the brilliant complainer, who interested her entirely too much. His words were like a pulse detected in a vast dead carcass. They seemed born as he spoke them, blooming in the secret space between his voice and Lucinda’s ears.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it since we hung up. When I was younger I used to love women’s bodies. I’d drive myself crazy picturing them. It was like women themselves were just the keepers of these glorious animals I wanted to pet. I kept trying to push them out of the way so I could get to this agenda I had with their, you know—flesh.”

Lucinda was grateful now for the gallery’s infestation by the journalists. Falmouth would be kept at bay. If only there hadn’t been an armpit sniffer one cubicle away. She hoped Jules Harvey was listening to the intern’s calls, not her own. Lucinda could hear the intern murmuring assent into her receiver, her pen scribbling noisily, filling the pages of legal pads with accounts of complaint, as Falmouth required.

“Later,” the complainer went on, “I realized it wasn’t women’s bodies I loved, it was women, actual women. I know that doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment. But women became my actual friends.”

“That doesn’t sound like a problem,” whispered Lucinda.

“For a while it wasn’t. For a while I was happy to have sex with the bodies of my friends. But eventually it wore me down. I couldn’t remember what I loved about the bodies because I’d become too fond of the women. It was like a vicious triangle.”